3. The increase of buildings in places exempt.
4. The increase of buildings about the Charterhouse, Mile End Fields; also at St Katherine’s along the water side.
5. The pestering of exempt places with strangers and foreign artificers.
6. The number of strangers in and about London of no church.
7. The haunting of plays out of the Liberties.
8. The killing of cattle within or near the city.
The best glimpses that we get of the plague in London in 1578 are in letters to Lord Burghley[671]. On October 22, the Recorder of London, Sir W. Fleetwood, writes to him that he “has been in Bucks since Michaelmas, because he was troubled every day with such as came to him having plague sores about them; and being sent by the Lords to search for lewd persons in sundry places, he found dead corses under the table, which surely did greatly annoy him.” It will be seen by the statistics that the deaths from all causes had risen to more than three hundred in a week before Michaelmas—a small mortality compared with that of 1563, or of any other London epidemic of the first degree. From other letters, relating to plague at St Albans, Ware and other places near London, it may be concluded that the citizens had escaped from London to their usual country resorts in plague-time. On August 30 there were said to be sixty cases of plague at St Albans, and on October 13 Ware is said to have been “of late” infected. Plague-deaths are entered also in the Hertford parish registers in 1577 and 1578[672]. On 14 September the infection was in the “Bull” at Hoddesdon (Herts), but the landlord refused to close his house against travellers on their way to the Court. On Oct. 13, 1578, two deaths are reported from Queens’ College, Cambridge, “the infection being taken by the company of a Londoner in Stourbridge Fair;” these two deaths had “moved many to depart” from the University[673]. In the same month it was at Bury St Edmunds. Earlier in the year, a letter from Truro (11 April) says that the plague was prevalent in Cornwall.
The epidemic of 1578 at Norwich was relatively a far more serious one than that of the capital, and was traced to the visit of the queen: “the trains of her Majesty’s carriage, being many of them infected, left the plague behind, which afterwards increased so and continued as it raged above one and three-quarter years after.” From August 20, 1578, to February 19, 1579, the deaths were 4817, of which 2335 were of English and 2482 of “alyan strangers,” ten aldermen being among the victims[674]. At Yarmouth, in 1579, two thousand are said to have died of the plague between May-day and Michaelmas[675]. Colchester had plague from December, 1578 to August, 1579[676]. It was at Ipswich and at Plymouth in 1579; the epidemic at the latter must have been severe, if the estimate of 600 deaths, given in the annals of the town, is to be trusted[677]. It was again at Stamford in 1580, as appears from an order of the corporation, September 7, prohibiting people from leaving the town[678]. Other centres of plague in 1580 were at Rye, which was cut off from intercourse with London[679], at Leicester, where an assessment for the visited was appointed by the common hall of the citizens[680], at Gloucester, from Easter to Michaelmas, and at Hereford and Wellington, the musters in October having been hindered by “the great infection of the plague[681].”
On February 4, 1582, six houses were shut up at Dover, and on September 12 there was plague in Windsor and Eton[682]. In the parish register of Cranbrooke (Kent), 18 burials are specially marked (as from plague) in 1581, 41 in 1582, and 22 in 1583[683]. It was much dispersed in the Isle of Sheppey, the year after (1584) from Michaelmas into the winter.
Although the years from the spring of 1583 to the autumn of 1592 appear to have been unmarked by plague in London, they witnessed a good many epidemics along the east coast, and in a few places elsewhere, of which the particulars are for the most part meagre.